Roy Nelson stood in the cage on Saturday night with his mountain man beard and his couch potato body, looking exactly like the kind of dude who only belongs at a pro sporting event when he buys a ticket.

As he demonstrated one more time, looks aren’t everything in a sport that’s always been more about function than form. Most of us who have followed his career over the years already knew that. Matt Mitrione apparently needed a reminder, and he got one. As Nelson teed off on the former NFL lineman midway through the first round of The Ultimate Fighter 16 Finale on Saturday, it sounded like someone was tenderizing veal with a shovel. The jiu-jitsu black belt who claims he only recently learned how to throw punch combos was now bouncing them off another helpless opponent’s skull.

Sorry, people who were hoping that Nelson would have faded into the background of the heavyweight division by now. The UFC’s bearded problem child won’t change, and he won’t go away. Maybe the UFC apparatus has finally learned to accept him. Maybe we all have, even if we occasionally wish that he could temper the impulses that make him exactly who he is.

The last time Nelson scored a big knockout was back in May as part of the UFC’s all-heavyweights main card at UFC 146. Following that win, he had some words for UFC President Dana White, who admitted he was “not a fan” of the whole motorcycle gang prospect look that Nelson has going on.

“That was Roy Nelson’s ‘f— you’ to me and Lorenzo [Fertitta],” White told reporters after the event. While White respected Nelson’s toughness and his ability, he said, he couldn’t understand why the man refused to do the little things that might make life as a pro fighter easier on him. What was the UFC president supposed to tell him when Nelson asked why he had so much trouble finding sponsors, White said, especially when he was walking around with this hair that was “beyond a mullet?”

“I don’t know what the hell that is now,” White said at the time. “It looks like a wig. And he’s got the big beard. His beard is grey.”

In a way, that’s great. Nelson brings some variety to the heavyweight division. He reminds people that you don’t have to look like a good fighter in order to be one. He’s also become perhaps the sport’s most vocal crusader for improved performance-enhancing drug testing – and at a time when MMA needs such a crusader. You just wish he could make it a little easier for people to take him seriously, especially when he’s being serious.

The drug testing issue is a perfect example of how “Big Country” sometimes lets his Big Country-ness overshadow his message. Ever since he teamed up with VADA to do exhaustive voluntary testing before each fight, he’s used it as much as a tool for self-promotion as a tool for cleaning up the sport. He wields it against opponents like an unspoken accusation. It turns VADA into the thing that Nelson tries to bully other fighters into, rather than a thing they could do together. It makes his fellow heavyweights want to resist it, just as Shane Carwin and Mitrione both did with no small amount of resentment.

“If Roy wants to bring it up to me, why doesn’t Roy bring it up to them and then they call me directly?” Mitrione said earlier this week, when explaining why he refused Nelson’s offer to participate in the voluntary testing. “Why would Roy call me directly and be like, ‘Hey, here’s the VADA stuff?’ What the f— kind of a president of a company would say, ‘Hey, just go ahead and handle that yourself?’ You want to get the attention from it? Want kind of bulls— is that?”

And, you have to admit, Mitrione has a point there. But he’s objecting to the how instead of the why, which is not so different from White’s criticism of Nelson from a promoter’s perspective. It’s the form rather than the function, yet again. The idea of supplemental voluntary testing is still a good one, whether you think VADA is the right agency to do it or not. Maybe it’s just that Nelson has gotten so used to doing things his own way – and so used to ignoring people who tell him he’s wrong – he can’t let himself work with people. He associates his own brand of stubbornness with independence, and he doesn’t see that sometimes his attitude is the problem rather than the solution.

Maybe that’s the way it has to be in order for Nelson to be the man he is. I can tell you it’s nothing new. Back when he was with the IFL, he had the same independent streak that bordered on paranoia. He was so sure that the organization wanted to see him fail that he almost turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even when he went over to EliteXC, he did it with grand conspiracy theories about the powerful forces that he felt were aligned against him. Now in the UFC, he’s only cranked up the volume on all the things that made him different to begin with. He’s so sure the powers that be hate him that he can’t relax sometimes and let them like him.

And the thing is, people do like him. A lot of fans are ready to rally behind a guy who looks like he should be guzzling Bud Light Lime at a NASCAR viewing party, but is instead cold-clocking chiseled gym rats on live TV. A lot of fans are also ready to support a push for better, more extensive drug testing. They just might not be as eager to get behind it if it seems like something Nelson is doing mostly to get his name in the headlines.

Even Mitrione touched on it before the fight in a radio interview with MMAWeekly.com. “I respect the effort that Roy’s putting forward, but I think a lot of it gets lost,” Mitrione said. “It’s like cut your hair, shave your beard and then try to bust somebody else’s balls about doing something. It’s great to stand out, but stand out for the right reasons, not necessarily the wrong ones.”

Of course, Mitrione also went on to insist that fans would rather see “a chiseled Adonis” than a “big bellied, pale, furry beast” like Nelson. Then he got knocked out by that same beast, perhaps reminding him that in the end it still matters more what you can do than how you look while you’re doing it.

That’s one of the great things about Nelson, how he reminds of us that on a regular basis. He’s the one who gives the lie to the suggestion that MMA is a beauty pageant in which promoters pick and choose who gets pushed and who gets left to rot. You think fighters are juicing because fans only want to see dudes with action figure abs? Then try to explain Nelson’s success, such as it is. He’s a fighter people want to see, at least in part because he is doing it his own way and making it work. It’d just be great if he could do that without cranking the volume up so loud that we can’t hear the message through all the noise.

A total of 26 fighters got their chance to shine on Saturday as part of UFC 190 at Rio de Janeiro’s HSBC Arena. Now that UFC 190 is in the books, it’s time to commence MMAjunkie’s “Three Stars” ceremony.

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